Iceland Spar, Chapter Twenty-One: The Harmonica Marching Band Comes Face to Face with its Own Mortality!

Here we have the final chapter of "Iceland Spar." It is indeed zany and also probably the densest, most challenging chapter so far. I shall attempt to do it justice.

So the Chums are at Candlebrow. Obviously, where they "would find exactly the mixture of nostalgia and amnesia to provide them a reasonable counterfeit of the Timeless" (406). We shall see them being forced to actually interrogate the nature of their existence, and find that some of the implications of that aren't altogether to their liking. But first, let us talk about "Smegmo," "an artificial substitute for everything in the edible-fat category, including margarine, which many felt wasn't that real to begin with" (407), but which is highly profitable for the school. I suppose that's capitalism for you: make people think that the most hideous-sounding shit imaginable is essential for their lives. Candlebrow, like the prevailing economic order, is built on a purely illusory infrastructure.

The Time Travel Conference has been going on since 1895--coinciding with the publication of Wells' Time Machine</i>--but, of course, since its time travel, there's no reason it can't also take place before then. The Conferences even feature "those who, each intervening year, might have, in some technical sense, 'died' outside the precincts of this enchanted campus, [who] once having drifted through the gates, were promptly 'resurrected.' (410).

That leads into this exchange:

"Is this what we have to look forward to around here, these sophomoric slogs through endless quagmires of the metaphysical? Frankly, I don't know how much of that I can tolerate."

"Lotta nice college 'nooky' around, though," commented Darby, leeringly.

"Another of your vulgarisms, Suckling, with which I must confess myself, no doubt mercifully, unfamiliar."

"An ignorance likely to continue," prophesied Miles Blundell, "until the year 1925 or thereabouts." (407)

So there you: Lindsay gets laid in 1925, per Miles. We must be in 1913-ish now (to the extent that we can say that this is taking place at any particular time). [Editor's note: I'm from the future, and I think this is wrong now.  I'm not sure how I've gotten confused, but I think we're more like 1904 or 1905-ish). I note this both because it's funny and because it hints at the themes of the chapter going forward: these are timeless Boy Adventurers! We've seen that the limits of that are a little nebulous, but STILL, talking about the future like things are going to change--like they're going to grow up and do things like lose their virginity--is kind of dissonant.

Anyway, they're looking for this Alonzo Meatman person, so they head over to a tavern he supposedly frequents. They meet a guy who is maybe going to tell them something but who has a kind of fit:

The youngster was shaking violently now, his eyeballs, jittering in their orbits, gone wild with fright. Around the edges of this form, a strange magenta-and-green aura has begun to flicker, as if from a source somewhere behind him, growing more intense as he himself faded from view, until seconds later nothing was left but a kind of stain in the air where he had been, a warping of the light as through ancient window-glass. (410-411)

Creepy. But! When the other Chums want to leave, understandably freaked out, Chick stays, "invoking the Science Officer's Discretionary, or S.O.D., Clause, as provided for in [their] charter" (411). They have an argument over this, but eventually he stays. I feel like S.O.D. should, like, mean something, but I don't see what it could. In any event, Meatman--for it was he--reappears, the disappearance having been a trick.

Here we learn--well, hear--more about the mysterious group that's been around the Chums, influencing them, allegedly. "You've been walking, unaware, among them since you arrived" (413), Meatman claims. But this group has an offer for them--or somebody has an offer for somebody; this stuff is really abstruse--an offer for what, it's not clear, but it's "the most extraordinary offer of Deliverance tendered us since--that other Promise made so long ago . . . " (413). Is this a Christ reference? Sure looks that way.

Meatman takes Chick to meet a representative of this group known only as "Mr. Ace," who explains:

We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present—your future—a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty—the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simple thermodynamic truth that Earth's resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalist illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth aloud were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day, we were forced to migrate, with little choice but to set forth upon that dark fourth-dimensional Atlantic known as Time. (415)

That's about the clearest you'll see this laid out in the novel, although it in due course is--naturally--called into question. Seeks plausible, however. Look around you. Are there, perhaps, things going on that would tend to confirm this evaluation of our time? Opinions vary! But now this group is stuck here--there not being enough power in this era for time travel (so what about this whole conference, and the time-machine demonstration we saw earlier, and Hunter Penhallow's apparent trip through time?). Mr. Ace further claims that "each of [the Chums'] mission assignments is intended to prevent some attempt of our own to enter your time-regime" (415). However, he wants the Chums to work for them, in an unclear capacity.

And what do these people have to offer in exchange? Eternal life, allegedly. Aren't the Chums already immortal. Well...that was certainly the assumption. But it was just an assumption. Nobody really thought about it. "The Trespassers had studied their targets closely, knew of the Chums' unquestioning faith that none of them, barring misadventure, would ever simply grow old and die, a belief which over the years many had come to confuse with a guarantee" (418). Worth noting at this point--if it wasn't already apparent--that the Chums are like the Beagle Boys or the Junior Woodchucks (I can only think in Disney comics similes) in that we have the main group of them, but there are also a whole bunch of others out there, doing their thing. And a some of them, unfortunately "turned in panic to the corrupt embrace of the Trespassers, ready to deal with Hell itself, to betray anything and anyone if only they could be sent back to when they were young, be allowed to regain the early boys'-book innocence they were so willing now to turn right around and violate on behalf of their insidious benefactors" (ibid).

That's not the only possible response, however. As we will recall, the Chums are, on a basic level, fictional characters, meaning that some of them "chose lateral solutions, sidestepping the crisis by passing into metaphorical identities" (ibid). Such do our particular Chums do, leading to their becoming students in the Marching Academy Harmonica Band, forgetting about their previous identity. This part plays out, I guess, sort of like an old college comedy: Meatman is still there, but transformed into an informant. Pynchon explains that, whereas squealers were normally regarded with horror, here they had "come to command a curious respect even from those who were apt to suffer from it most" (421). This is because they're paid well, and thus can splash out for parties and things. But how is this different from any squealer anywhere? It does seem like a good metaphor for capitalism, however, where you're convinced that corporations that are fucking you over in the long run are your friends. How 'bout that two-day Amazon shipping?

I should also note--just to give an idea of the reality here--that there's a zany musical number when Meatman's gone missing. That's fun.

There's a weirdly lengthy section with Meatman going to inform, which doesn't seem to go anywhere and which I can't claim to understand. Soon after, the Chums start to come to their senses: "what is they weren't harmonica players? Really? (422). I find this part weirdly evocative, even though it may not be the most relevant bit:

They may only have once been readers of the Chums of Chance Series of boys' books, authorized somehow to serve as volunteer decoys. Once, long ago, from soft hills, from creekside towns, from libraries that let kids lie on the floor where it's cool and read the summer afternoons away, the Chums had needed them . . . they came. (423).

There's some suggestion--as ever, it's ambiguous--that there's some difference between their identities as "Chums" and just "boys"--more duality: "So that when the "real" Chums flew away, the boys were left to the uncertain sanctuary of the Harmonica Marching Band Training Academy" (423). You would need an extremely speculative wall chart to keep track of what characters are in what "realities" relative to one another. And what a great wall chart that would be!

Anyway, they do figure things out, and now seem to have a healthier relationship to the world and the Trespassers: "more closely attuned to their presence and long disabused of any faith in their miracle-working abilities" (424). They're not sure what to do, but Meatman comes strolling in--they, the Trespassers, were allegedly in Venice at the time of the destruction of the Campanile di San Marco (and responsible for it?); he has a copy of the Sfinciuno Itinerary, which you'll remember as the supposed map into Inner Asia, and thence to the hidden city of Shambhala. He wants them to continue this quest, to which they express natural "you're not the boss of me" sentiments. But it turns out that Chums High Command also wants them there. Is the High Command in league with the Trespassers? We may never know. We will definitely never know. Still, they've gotta do it. And for that, they need sand suits. Where to get those? Well, through none other than Roswell Bounce, Merle's old pal, who is apparently now a professor at Candlebrow. There's a lot of very confusing talk about how moving in sand works (probably also relevant to concerns about Scrooge McDuck swimming in money). Bounce explains that first you need a lot of heat to make the sand transparent, like glass or quartz, but then there's too much heat, so you need to displace that--and to do that, "one must arrange to translate oneself in Time" (426) I think we'll notice more of this space/time stuff--diachronic vs synchronic--as the book proceeds. Is this going back in time? Through dimensions? Probably! "Maybe some of us are ready to step 'sidewise once more, into the next dimension--into Time--our fate, our lord, our destroyer" (427). So speculates the ever-spacey (ha ha) Miles.

"I'd be getting in the air," High Command tells them through their Tesla device, "if I were you fellows. Mustn't jeopardize a perfect record of doing as you're told" (427-428). Damn, High Command--passive-aggressive much? Of course, questions of to what extent that Chums should be following these disembodied commands hangs in the air.

Well. I feel like I only scratched the surface of this chapter, but REALLY, this will go on ALL DAY if we don't call a halt. Next: Bilocations.